Stanley Kubrick's Secret to Creating Amazing Films That Change The World

There is one thing that always stands out about paintings that were created in the pre-electricity age: their lighting.

Soft and organic, the lighting in most paintings before electricity was harnessed for mass use glows beautifully in the most natural way. This of course is because natural light was all they had available.

This is the aesthetic that Stanley Kubrick went for in his film Barry Lyndon which is seeing limited release in the UK.

Kubrick wanted the movie to be filmed in natural light to better capture the feel of the 1750's, and did so to the best of his crew's abilities. This proved hard to do particularly in situations where light was limited, such as the infamous candle scene.

Not one to be discouraged easily, the director went about tackling this in two innovative ways:

First, he used specially designed camera lenses built by NASA for the moon landing, which allowed more light in than the commercially available lenses of that time.

Then, he had the entire film "push processed." This is one of many ways film shooters brighten their film, by leaving the film in the processing machine longer than they would for a regular cut, which overdevelops the film and makes it brighter.

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For months they tinkered with different combinations of lenses and film stock to make this possible, before getting hold of a number of super-fast 50mm lenses developed by Zeiss for use by Nasa in the Apollo moon landings. With their huge aperture and fixed focal length, mounting these was a nightmare, but they managed it, and so Kubrick's vision of recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age was miraculously put on screen.